9/29/2009 @ 12:00PM

HP's Ann Livermore: Making Time For Face Time

Soon after she joined
Hewlett-Packard
straight out of Stanford Business School in 1982, Ann Livermore, executive vice president of the company’s Technology Solutions Group, discovered how much she relished mentoring employees and working closely with customers.

But the more she has advanced–especially since she was promoted to her current job–the more time she has had to spend on planning strategy and overseeing the company’s overall financial performance.

Four months later, Livermore, who already ran HP’s servers, storage and software units, was asked to take over the company’s services business, including EDS. Her group generated close to $40 billion, or 47% of HP’s total revenues for the first nine months of fiscal 2009, and includes about 200,000 employees across scores of functions and countries. Such a huge job could presumably keep Livermore from what she loves most as a business leader–lots of face time with customers and employees. But rather than make that mistake, Livermore finds ways to stay connected.

Here, Livermore talks to ForbesWoman about how she does it:

“The bigger your responsibilities at any company, the more important it is to have a great staff that has been given very clear directions. Mark Hurd and I spend a lot of our time on our financial results, but second to that is making sure we have quality talent and building a very strong team. It’s like a sport where you set everyone up and their goal is to play to win.

“Since I took over running EDS, I have about two-thirds of HP’s [321,000] employees reporting to me. But I still stay true to the core things I believe in. One of the biggest mistakes executives can make is to believe they’re too busy to stay connected with customers and first-line employees. So while I have people helping me prioritize how to do this most effectively, I’ll always devote time to it.

“I talk to at least three or four customers a day because they give us the very best ideas for how to improve our business and what products they need most. When I traveled to Spain recently, I had a meeting with a customer practically the minute I landed and then had dinner with our leadership team there. The next day I met with all our employees [in Spain] and then had lunch with about 15 mid-level top performers and then a roundtable with about a dozen customers. All that contact happened in just 24 hours.

“We’ve always been known as an engineering company with great products–we ship a server every 11 seconds. But now [since HP acquired EDS] the service business is our largest, and suddenly the whole profile of the company has changed. I’ve always had the desire for HP to be viewed in customers’ minds as the undisputed leader in enterprise computing, the place they automatically think to go when they have a business problem–and we now have the opportunity to be that.

“When customers sign a large service agreement, they are making a multiyear decision, a bet that you will be the right choice for them for five years out and more. They’re looking into our eyes and thinking, “How good will they be in the future?” and “How will they react when we have a problem?” This is different from purchasing a product that will be replaced in two or three years. You need involvement to keep those relationships. So when I talk to new hires, I tell them that the first thing they need to do is serve our customers.

“I talk about how what matters most is the quality of a team from top to bottom rather than any one individual. And I’m always reviewing people–not just formal performance reviews, but giving suggestions constantly on how to do things better. That’s part of staying in touch as well.

“There’s nothing balanced about my life. When you sign up for a job that is so encompassing, you have to know this and love it, or else don’t do it.”